The Attorney General Who Got a Hate Crime Hotline Up and Running in Less Than a Week

Since Election Day, the Southern Poverty Law Center has logged over 400 incidents of harassment or intimidation. On Twitter, the activist and writer Shaun King spent the weekend retweeting descriptions of hate crimes to draw attention to the crisis. Preferring to criticize nationwide protests of his win, President-Elect Donald Trump stayed silent on the matter of these attacks until Sunday. During his interview with 60 Minutes that aired Sunday, he condemned the violence: "If it helps, I will say this, and I will say [it] right to the cameras: Stop it."

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Meanwhile, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey turned to her staff and made a plan. On Monday, she launched a hotline that allows people to report incidents of vandalism, harassment, and intimidation directed at racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. She's tasked her office with the job of staffing the hotline and has promised to investigate every potential case.

"I think it's really crucial that people know that those of us in government ... will protect people's rights, will fight discrimination, and will protect people's safety," she says, a not-so-subtle nod to the businessman who will take office in January.

She tells me that it's not necessarily "impressive" that the hotline was set up and announced within days—it was crucial. "We just have to act fast," Healey says, "Every day we are learning more about what's going out there." Based out of her office, she's put together a team of lawyers, investigators, and staffers in both her civil rights division and in criminal bureau who are "at the ready."

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"This is our job," she says. "This is what people depend on us to do."

And that's as true in Alabama and Pennsylvania and Arizona and in every other state as it is in Massachusetts. So, yes, Healey would very much like to see her initiative replicated elsewhere. It's not only Massachusetts that has seen this wave of hate, she points out. The onus is on government officials everywhere to stand for a different "rule of law" than the one that was touted during the election.

"The other day a woman left my office wearing a hijab. As soon as she was out on the street in Boston, she was yelled at to 'go home.'"

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"We're in a time now where a lot of people are scared, a lot of people are afraid," Healey says. She's heard from women who've been subjected to sexist tirades, minorities who fear that they're not welcome in certain neighborhoods, LGBTQ individuals who've been attacked. "The other day a woman left my office wearing a hijab," Healey says. "As soon as she was out on the street in Boston, she was yelled at to 'go home.'" It's serious, she says, and it's having an impact on scores of people who need reassurance that the government will do whatever it can to hold offenders accountable. "To me, we have to send the message that we have laws to protect civil rights, we have laws to protect public safety, and we're going to enforce those laws in the face of conduct that is happening already or may come," Healey says. "Such conduct has no place in Massachusetts or anywhere else."

Healey admits that as a highly public woman in government, she's intimately acquainted with the kind of abuse she wants to end. "I've experienced some of that," she says, pointing to the endless harassment she endured in the wake of her announcement that the state would enforce an assault weapons ban. And by the time we speak on Tuesday, she says she's already been attacked on social media for her launching the hotline. "It's unfortunate," she allows, but she tries not to dwell on it. She's hellbent on reminding Trump that innocent people are counting on him.

"He made outrageous statements during the course of this campaign that were not only hurtful, but discriminatory towards so many racial, ethnic, religious minorities, to women, to LGBTQ individuals, to immigrants," she says. "He needs to work very hard to undo the damage that he did in the way that he conducted this race."